OTTAWA — Canada’s backlog of asylum claims will likely reach 100,000 by the end of 2021 before stabilizing, up from 75,000 today, the chairperson of the Immigration and Refugee Board told a parliamentary committee on Tuesday.

The board’s goal now is to manage the growth of the backlog rather than to reduce it, Richard Wex told the committee. He said that without recent injections of federal funding, the backlog would likely have grown to 165,000 claims in the next couple of years, with wait times extending beyond five years, compared to less than two years currently.

“What we’re focused on in terms of the next 24 months with the temporary funding in Budget 2018 and 2019 is not to eliminate the backlog,” Wex said. “It is to slow the growth of the pace of the backlog from what it would otherwise be.”

Once the backlog is stabilized, Wex said, the government will have various options for dealing with it, including targeted funding to get those claims resolved. He estimated it would cost between $200 million and $400 million to eliminate a backlog of 100,000 refugee claims.

Wex and other officials from the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB), the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) appeared before the House of Commons public accounts committee on Tuesday to answer questions about an auditor general’s report released earlier this month. The report found that Canada’s asylum system is unable to cope with spikes in the number of claimants, due to inadequate funding and poor sharing of information between the three agencies.

More than 50,000 would-be refugees have claimed asylum in Canada in each of the past two years, compared with fewer than 24,000 in 2016. The surge is related in part to an influx of asylum seekers entering Canada from the United States between official ports of entry.

This year’s federal budget promised $1.18 billion over five years to speed up the processing of asylum claims and enhance border security. The money builds on $173 million that Ottawa allocated to irregular migration in Budget 2018.

Wex said that money has helped the IRB to work faster, in part by paying for hundreds of new staff and adjudicators. The board plans to complete 42,000 claims this year and 50,000 claims next year. If the number of new asylum claimants stays steady around 50,000 a year, the backlog should stop growing, he said. So far in 2019, there’s been a 46-per-cent decrease in asylum seekers crossing the border illegally compared with this time last year. “The system is being managed,” Wex said.

Ottawa is also taking steps to reduce the number of asylum seekers who can make claims in this country. This year’s budget bill includes a measure that allows Canada to turn away asylum seekers who have already filed claims in certain countries, marking an about-face in the Liberal government’s previously welcoming attitude toward refugee claimants.

What we’re focused on in terms of the next 24 months … is not to eliminate the backlog. It is to slow the growth of the pace of the backlog

At Tuesday’s committee meeting, Liberal MP Alexandra Mendès took the officials to task over the auditor general’s finding that the three agencies still rely on paper files, and often share files by fax or courier instead of electronically.

“How are we in 2019 still talking about this? It boggles my mind,” she said. “Ten years ago, I was on the immigration committee and we were asking exactly those questions already because the auditor general had already mentioned that. So what is the issue?”

Lori MacDonald, acting deputy minister of immigration, said the agencies have struggled to switch to electronic processing because departments work independently and their IT systems aren’t always connected. But she said a newly created asylum system management board is working on the transition.

“I can’t answer to the past, but I can tell you that we’re seized with it,” she said.

But Mendès said she can’t understand why the problem has taken so long to resolve, and said it causes problems for her constituents trying to navigate the system. “I have people in my office every single week with issues with the IRB. And it’s heart-wrenching, because … we can’t really help them to resolve the issue,” she said. “Something that seems so basic.”

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